October 20, 2026

Handshake Halloween

My entry for Handshake’s “Dress the Handshake Logo for Halloween” challenge. Handshake’s lime was always monster green, so I dressed the H as Frankenstein’s monster: a flat-top fringe, neck bolts and a stitched crossbar, all built from the letterform itself. The entry runs from paper sketches to an app icon tested down to 16 px, and three short films set in 2D, a 3D studio and a castle lab.

Overview

Handshake’s “Dress the Handshake Logo for Halloween” challenge asked for a Halloween costume for its logo, as an image or a short video of the logo transforming. The winning design becomes Handshake’s Halloween logo for a week across the app, web and social, and entries are judged equally on execution, creativity, polish and social likes. I designed the costume, the app icon and all three films.

The Idea

The brief allowed any costume, spooky or silly. Most of them would push the logo off its own palette, so I looked for a character that already matched it.

Sketches

I started on paper with five costumes: a devil, a jack-o’-lantern, Jack Skellington, a Beetlejuice attempt and Frankenstein. Only Frankenstein kept every brand color, so it was the one I took to color, with the motion already drawn in: the hair drops, the bolts slide in.

The Icon

Every piece of the costume comes from the letter. The fringe leans at the H’s italic angle, the bolts punch out through both edges so the tile reads as a head, and the scar sits on the crossbar, where the two halves of the H meet. The H itself is untouched, traced from the official mark.

Legibility

I tested the icon from 240 px down to 16 px on light and dark backgrounds, using only the two brand colors.

Film 01 — 2D

The first film is hand-built vector animation, so the logo is exact on every frame. The power fails, lightning strikes, the hair springs down, the bolts slide in and the scar stitches itself shut before the color flickers back on.

Film 02 — 3D Studio

For the 3D version I built the tile in Blender and rendered its first and last frames in Cycles: the plain icon and the finished monster. AI video fills the ten seconds between them, so the logo is exact where it matters. I ran the same two keyframes through Seedance 2.5 and Kling 2.5. Kling was more dramatic, but an electric X covered the H for two seconds, so Seedance became the submission take.

Film 03 — The Castle Lab

The castle film is the take built for likes: lightning through the window, a squash-and-stretch hair drop, bolts slamming in and a swooping camera to the hero close-up. The background plates were generated, then the transparent Blender renders were composited on top.

Deliverables

An app icon with an SVG master; a size set from 240 px to 16 px on light and dark; three films (2D, 3D studio and castle lab, 7 to 10 seconds each); and a pitch deck with the rationale. Tools: Blender (Cycles), Seedance 2.5, Kling 2.5 and AI image generation for the background plates.

Outcome

I submitted the entry on October 20, 2026, ahead of the October 22 deadline. Judging is still to come.